Following Apple’s Tuesday morning media event, major parts of the company’s Web site was unavailable and returned “access denied” errors to Web browsers. The timing was bad for Apple since the down time coincided with the introduction of the iPhone 4S, Siri and new iPod touch and nano models, and may well have been a malicious act against the company.
apple.com: No access for you!
Visit attempts to main Apple pages, such as the company’s home page, returned the “access denied” error, although many sub-pages were intermittently available. Apple’s online store remained available, too.
A quick whois search showed unexpected domain info for the company with messages saying Apple was “PWNED.BY.M1CROSOFT,” “OWN3D.BY.NAKEDJER,” AND “0WN3D.BY.GULLI.”
apple.com whois info: not quite right
A hacker group called Anonymous Sri Lanka claimed to have launched a DNS snooping attack against Apple and several other companies in August, and released the primary domain name server records for the companies on the Internet.
So far no one has stepped forward to take credit for the possible attack on Apple’s domain, although the whois data for the company seems to point to an intentional act. The timing of the incident helps support that idea, too.
Apple hasn’t commented yet on the incident.